Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method for transmitting digital scene description data from a transmitter scene processing device to at least one receiver scene processing device.
The invention is further related to a transmitter scene processing device and to a receiver scene processing device.
Background Description
There is a need of transmitting digital scene description data from a transmitter scene processing device to at least one receiver scene processing device and further using the transmitted digital scene description data with high quality. However, transmitting digital scene description data to be used in high quality requires transmitting a high amount of data in reasonable time and processing the digital scene description data in reasonable time.
Rendering procedures for reducing the amount of data to be transmitted are well known in the art. Rendering is a process of generating an image from at least one model or scene by means e.g. of computer programming instructions executed on a processing unit. A scene contains objects in a defined language or data structure. A scene comprises attributes e.g. for defining geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting and shading for describing the scene. Executing rendering commands on digital scene description data including attributes results in an animated digital image or graphics image file.
The term “scene” as set forth in the present application comprises at least one picture, frame of a picture, or sequence of pictures, i.e. video.
A plurality of graphic processing tools is available to the public including OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) providing program instructions and related executables for rendering processing:
The OpenGL specification encoding resources comprising rendering libraries are available in the internet from the OpenGL organisation (http://www.opengl.org) without licence as open source. OpenGL is further described in the OpenGL reference manual: The Official Reference Document to OpenGL, Version 1.4 (4th Edition), Mar. 26, 2004, Editor Dave Schreiner, Addison-Wesley Professional and in Dave Schreiner, OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Versions 3.0 and 3.1 (7th Edition), Jul. 31, 2009, Addison-Wesley Professional.
US 2007/0153004 A1 discloses an animation file player provided for display animation files with an embedded system graphics application programming interface. For displaying an animation file information on a graphics enabled mobile device, an animation file is stored and converted to graphics rendering information. The graphics rendering information is passed to a mobile device graphics subsystem where the graphics rendering information is processed to obtain pixel data. An animation of the pixel data is displayed on a mobile device display.
WO 2009/040313 A1 discloses a method and system for remote visualisation of a graphics application using an OpenGL library. A local computer system comprises the OpenGL library and an encoder for translating operation systems specific OpenGL interface operations into operating systems independent operations for transmitting between the local computer system and one or more remote computer systems. The at least one remote computer system is comprising a decoder for decoding the operating system independent operations into operations of the second OpenGL interface for a second type of operating system. The operations may relay to windowing system specific rendering methods.
A problem of the prior art is that processing of digital scene description data on a device requires a lot of limited processing resources and limited battery power and that the bandwidth for transmitting the required amount of digital scene description data for higher resolution display is limited.